Fact Become Myth: C.S. Lewis and Israelite History

I have been contemplating this today, on the Incarnation, being as it is Christmas day. Whitney over at Rialb's Blog (see non-Harry external links over on the left) has blogged about this matter and this particular line of thought and writing in C. S. Lewis. The title of this post is a word-play, for the name of Lewis' famous essay was "Myth Became Fact," in God in the Dock. The idea is that "myth" refers not to things that are "untrue" but to truths that transcend historical facticity (equating truth solely with historical fact, as modernism does in rampant forms in such things as "the news," amounts to really nothing other than Materialism and Atheism). The Incarnation is the one place where myth actually became historical fact in the person of Jesus Christ. God became man and thus is real in all forms of reality, both "myth" (spiritual) and historical fact (physical/material). In listening to the reading from Isaiah at midnight Mass, I began to contemplate the question of the role of Israel's factual history. I came to the conclusion that just as Christ is the fulfillment of that history, as He is the fulfillment of all human history - so the history of Israel recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures (what we Christians call the Old Testament) is really the other half of the formula that begins, or rather ends - or rather both begins and ends - with Christ as "myth become fact": It is "fact become myth." It is the mundane details of the physical history of an ethnic and political group, but one who was the "first-born" from among all the nations of the world and meant to be at the head of all humanity united with God in the Incarnation. God assumed that physical history up into a higher realm of truth. In Israel and their fulfillment in Christ He took mundane fact and transformed it into the wonder of "myth," so that in the return journey of Christ as "myth become fact" He might transform fact/physicality into something so much more than mundane. Within the mundaneness of our muggle facts He hid the magic of His love for us to find.